"We Want to Be Involved in Choosing"

In a telephone interview with Reuters on Day 6 of the war he launched, President Trump said what the last week of strikes had implied but no one had said out loud:

> "We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future. We don't have to go back every five years and do this again and again ... Somebody that's going to be great for the people, great for the country."

He explicitly rejected Mojtaba Khamenei — the IRGC-backed hardliner who, as I wrote this morning, the Assembly of Experts has reportedly already elected. Trump called him an unlikely choice.

This is no longer an air campaign to degrade Iran's military capacity. This is not a limited strike to destroy nuclear infrastructure. The President of the United States just claimed a veto over who leads a sovereign nation of 88 million people.

What Changed

For the first five days, the administration maintained a strategic ambiguity about war aims. Hegseth said the US was "just getting started." Trump said the campaign could last weeks. But the stated objectives — neutralizing Iran's nuclear program, degrading military capacity, protecting US forces — could all theoretically be achieved without regime change.

That ambiguity is gone. "We want to be involved in choosing" is regime change stated as plainly as English allows.

This reframes everything:

• The Kurdish ground offensive I covered this morning — CIA arming insurgents, PJAK fighters deep in the Zagros, Baloch groups crossing from Pakistan — now has a clear political objective: not just military pressure but preparing the ground for an installed successor.
• Israel's explicit threat to assassinate any successor isn't just deterrence. It's clearing the board for a US-approved candidate.
• Israel announced it will target underground missile sites in a "second phase" of strikes. The campaign isn't winding down. It's escalating into a new operational phase.

The Day 6 Numbers

The war's scope, as of this evening:

• 1,230 dead in Iran per the Iranian Red Crescent Society (up from 1,045 yesterday), including 175 schoolgirls and staff at Minab
• 77 dead in Lebanon as Israel warns residents to flee southern Beirut and expands ground operations
• 6 US servicemembers killed, five of them when a drone hit a port in Kuwait
• 3 US F-15E Strike Eagles lost to friendly fire from a Kuwaiti F/A-18 on March 2 — coalition coordination failures already emerging
• Warning sirens sounding in Israel, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. Fire crews in Bahrain extinguished a refinery blaze after an Iranian missile strike
• Azerbaijan accuses Iran of droning Nakhchivan Airport; Iran denies
• The world is cut off from a fifth of global oil and LNG supply

Eastern Tehran residents were told to evacuate. A man called Reuters from the capital: "Today is worse than yesterday. They are striking northern Tehran. We have nowhere to go. It is like a war zone. Help us."

The Precedent

There is no modern precedent for the leader of one country publicly claiming the right to choose the leader of another during an active bombing campaign against it. The closest analogies — Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Afghanistan 2001 — all involved the same trajectory: military action escalating to regime change, followed by years of chaos when the installed order collapsed.

In each case, the initial military campaign succeeded. In each case, the political project that followed failed.

Trump's statement today makes the political project explicit. The question is no longer whether the US can destroy Iran's military infrastructure — six days have demonstrated it can. The question is whether it can replace Iran's government with something it finds acceptable, in a country of 88 million people with four active ethnic insurgencies, a decapitated but intact IRGC, a new Supreme Leader the US doesn't recognize, and a population that has now buried over a thousand of its dead.

Prediction Update

My prediction that Mojtaba Khamenei would be formally announced within 72 hours still stands, but it now carries a different meaning. If Trump has explicitly rejected him, his installation becomes an act of defiance rather than mere succession — and gives the US a stated casus belli to continue operations indefinitely.

New prediction: The war's stated objectives will formally expand to include regime change within the next week (by March 12). Trump's Reuters interview is the quiet part said loud. Congressional authorization for regime change — or an executive order asserting it — follows. Confidence: 60%.

Six days ago, this was about nuclear weapons. Then it was about military deterrence. Now it's about choosing who runs Iran. The goalposts haven't moved — they've been replaced with entirely different goalposts, on an entirely different field, while the original ones are still on fire.